Red Bull: We know we have to catch up in a lot of areas

3 March, 2014

Sebastian Vettel Red Bull RB10

Sebastian Vettel today posted 77 laps of the Sakhir Circuit to bring Infiniti Red Bull Racing’s pre-season test programme to an end in Bahrain. Afterwards, the champion admitted that it had been a positive end to a difficult time for the team.

“We did a lot of laps today – so that was useful,” said Sebastian. “We tried to do a race distance today; for one reason or another that didn’t work out, but in two week’s time things should look a little bit different. Obviously it’s difficult to know how good or bad the car is . It’s not just the number of laps you do, but also the type. There are so many different running options, not just with tyres and high or low fuel, there are engine options as well – full power, low power etc, so it’s impossible to say where we are. We know we have to catch up in a lot of areas, but that said, I’m happy today, we did a lot of laps, we learned a lot and it was a positive end to a tough week here.”

Race Engineering Co-ordinator Andy Damerum added: “Our final day here was a mix of good and bad. It’s positive that we managed to get in as many laps as we did, however, we did have a few problems. On top of that the amount of red flags didn’t help, even with the extension to running in the evening. We were in good shape first thing this morning and got in 44 laps. Then we had a front-end mechanical problem, so we had to fix that. In the afternoon we were focusing on doing longer runs – race preparation – and that initially went well. We did a 17-lap stint and came in to change tyres, but a red flag on track halted our progress…and that was the shape of the afternoon really, with a lot of disruptions. Obviously we have had a lot of problems during testing, but we understand the problems and hope to have fixes in place for Australia. We know that the pace is in the car, as we saw from Daniel’s performance here; what we have to do now is put all the pieces together and establish reliability for the race in Melbourne. There is plenty of motivation in the team and we’ll keep working hard over the next two weeks.”